When they’re done well, a satisfying solo show is a bit of an emotional burlesque.

Instead of showing some skin, the finest ones show some soul.

Daniel MacIvor has been executing these theatrical fan dances for so long in shows such as Monster, Here Lies Henry and Cul-de-Sac in so many venues across North America, scooping up awards and acclaim and reverential reviews, that for his new one, This is What Happens Next, one of the thematic threads he chose to explore was the nature of storytelling itself.

“The idea of storytelling is where everything comes from,” MacIvor say. “It’s where religion comes from, it’s where philosophy comes from — and I think people forget that that’s what we’re constantly doing.”

Not only is storytelling an essential part of the experience of being human, but over the years, MacIvor has come to conclude that the types of stories you tell can shape your personality.

“We can choose to tell negative stories,” he says, “or positive stories and it seems to be that those of us who choose to tell positive stories end up living in a bit more positive world.”

That’s a lesson that’s been a long time coming, he admits.

“My stories (in previous plays) haven’t been particularly positive,” he says. “So that’s something that I address in the show directly — the idea of a happy ending, and wanting a happy ending and what a happy ending means, and why we either feel like we want it, or why we feel we don’t deserve it — the idea of storytelling isn’t as self-conscious as it might appear just inside this small kind of art.

“It’s about storytelling in the way we live and tell stories.”

What’s the story he tells in This is What Happens Next?

It’s the distillation of a process MacIvor goes through each time he creates a new show with longtime collaborator, director Daniel Brooks, who is usually MacIvor’s first and only audience member, while he works out the nuts and bolts of his stories.

In This is What Happens Next, “there are two or three obsessions that become part of the beginning,” he says.

“In this show, one of them was sort of the disillusion of a marriage, and elements around recovery programs and recovery, the central idea there being will — the idea of self-will — and the third being the notion of the purpose of storytelling.”

Those stories, however, come out of MacIvor in unconventional ways, featuring plenty of improvisation, character interviews conducted by Brooks, and other sorts of theatre exercises designed to get a story off the page and up on its feet.

“We’ll workshop it a couple of times,” he says, “then bring designers in very early that start talking about space and light and sound and how those things all live together (onstage).

“There really isn’t a script until quite late in the process,” he adds. “It’s a very odd kind of process. It’s not like me sitting down at a computer at a keyboard writing something and then presenting it to him — we really do make it together — although I do the writing that we do make the show together.”

Of course, that doesn’t make those initial run-throughs in front of Brooks any easier, MacIvor says.

“He’s my (first) audience — and he’s not an easy one,” says MacIvor.

“He’s also a Torontonian,” he adds. “In Montreal, they say it’s the city that welcomes you with folded arms.

“And that’s very true of the audiences here (in Toronto),” he says, continuing. “You spend the first 10 minutes of any show just trying to pry their arms apart.”

Of course, that said, MacIvor has managed, over the past two or three decades, to pry audience arms apart more regularly than most playwrights.

Now, after winning Obies, Doras, Chalmers, a Governor’s General and the Siminovitch Prize, MacIvor has a new hill to climb: being 50.

Any story there?

“Pretty good,” he says. “Not bad. Easier than 45 somehow.”

He adds: “Time moves faster once you’re lived more — it just obviously moves faster. But I feel good at 50. At 30, I had so much to prove and that distracted me from my work, and I feel less so now.

“My concerns have shifted. I mean, you know, 50 — I don’t think it’s the new 30 or whatever the hell it is people are saying — but I like it. It’s all right. It’s OK. It’s funny. Like the Rabbits — I’ve known them for decades. We’re all kind of — here we go! We’re moving together toward ... olderness.”

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Solo show explores the way we tell our story
Daniel MacIvor puts heart, soul and experience into This is What Happens Next

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